Notes from a small press bender

It’s a good day if I don’t get asked either of these questions by people I know:

1. How are you?
2. Have you read any good books lately?

These questions always overwhelm me. They’re too broad. I think I’d have an easier time with them if I could willfully go into macro-perspective mode, but I’m usually on the life-one-day-at-a-time program, and it’s difficult to pan out a bit. I think the accepted shorthand for this state of being is survival mode, but I hesitate to claim that because in terms of circumstances, I’m not doing too shabby. It’s just my mind that causes problems.

I don’t think there’s a simple formula for answering questions about our emotional state without lying. And people who know me can verify that I have no capacity for guile, so I’m functionally incapable of lying. But I’m very aware that my candid answer to how are you? doesn’t land great with general audiences. Here’s what I’ve been working with for several months: “Mostly numb. I don’t think I have any good news in my future. I wish I’d die of natural causes already.” Very goth, I know, but at least it’s descriptive. And most importantly, it honors the reality of local and global feelings. That is, you can have an overarching sense of gratitude about your circumstances or you can have a steady undercurrent of anxiety or numbness in your life. Those are global feelings—things you either have or don’t. All of those things can be true even as you experience joy when you see a puppy, fear when you see a clown, or disgust when you see mayonnaise (if you’re me). It’s all there. The global and local feelings don’t cancel each other out. And strangely, I feel like there’s a similar complexity in my reading habits.

Even people who know very little about me assume I’m an avid reader. They’re not wrong. Reading stuff by people you believe in is just good literary citizenship, and I take that responsibility seriously. My to-be-read shelf is usually packed to capacity even when I’m getting through more than a book a week. Once or twice a year, I pony up and write something of an essay about work that I really fall in love with. But otherwise, I feel the same way about most books as I do about life: I have respect, even gratitude, for thankless months and years that go into a book-length project, but I feel mostly numb toward what I read. So when people pull out the “good books” question like a parlor trick, I’m really bad at answering. I usually just give my uninspired take on the book I most recently finished and tell them what I’m currently reading. On the spot, I don’t think to deconstruct their question by asking them to define their terms for “good” or asking if they want to know whose work I’m really excited about. So they usually just get my past week or two of reading in review. It seems unfair. My characteristic neutrality isn’t a great litmus test for how a book will land for every person.

It’s likely that my general disenchantment about life won’t change any time soon. But I recently took a conscious timeout from a certain type of reading, and am really glad I did. A little over a week ago, I finished a May release from a friend/nonfiction instructor. That, I decided was the last book from one of the “Big 5” publishing houses that I’d allow myself to read before digging in to the three I’ve been hoarding from small presses.

For posterity, that very good May release is about domestic violence, and was one of my favorite reading experiences in recent memory. I’ve been singing its praises to anybody who will listen, so I’ll just get this out of the way: It’s called No Visible Bruises, it’s by Rachel Louise Snyder, and if you feel inclined to look it up and buy, please do so from an independent bookseller because that one website that a lot of people buy books from doesn’t give a fuck about ending violence against women (or anyone). It just cares about making money. Anyway, now we return to regularly scheduled programming…

The revolving door of books coming out of the big five publishing world is great and all. But those titles are often limited in at least one critical way: they are books that publishers think will sell with a general audience—at least well enough to break even. It’s why I was content to park it on something out of that solar system that was satisfying, stylistically excellent, demanding of its readers, and ultimately very consequential. In my view, domestic violence is right up there with climate change (and that awful, awful website that a lot of people buy books from) in the pantheon of issues that we can trick ourselves into ignoring at our own imminent risk. BUT not all books that come from big publishers pack that punch. And it turns out that crimping the big five firehose to spend some time with small press titles was one of the best things I’ve done for myself this year. And I’m really glad that the books were short enough that I was able to read all of them in the span of a few days. That’s because although the three projects couldn’t be more different from each other, each author approached their material on their own terms. These books weren’t retrofitted for mass consumption.

I don’t mean it as a dig on anybody who takes their work to the bigs, so to speak, but raw integrity is really important to me. I’ve realized that it’s rare for any artist to get to a point where they have total creative control and a big platform. So part of why these books struck a chord is that they felt uncompromising. Nobody else could’ve written them. What’s more, because I read them consecutively, they felt in conversation with each other even though I can’t think of a context that would naturally put them together as a triple feature.

This is all to say that I stan Tyrese Coleman, Chris La Tray, and Tara Campbell—three great stylists who are pushing formal and vocal conventions in a way that really does right by their material. And in doing so, they’ve gotten some well-deserved attention, from starred reviews to full-on awards. But, taking this back to the spirit of the anxiety I feel around the questions about “good books” and my emotional state, I’m not documenting my small press bender as a way of grading these books that would still kick ass whether or not I know it. I just connected to each of them in a way that was timely and personal. And I hope that putting this out there might make my other jaded writer pals (which describes many of my friends) feel like they can free themselves from their own big five reading queue shackles to pursue a small press bender of their own. Anyway, here are the titles, and the things that I owe their dreamboat authors a debt of gratitude for:

How to Sit (Mason Jar Press, 2018) // Tyrese Coleman

Coleman has been clear about her intentions with this book, which is described on the cover as a “memoir in stories and essays.” It’s neither strict fiction or nonfiction. But, in a sense, it’s all true. True in a way that Coleman herself defines in her note at the beginning: “memories contain their own truth regardless of how they are documented.” And that, I think is the key to reading and really being blown away by How to Sit. It all reads like memory. Unembellished memory as it is. And it’s all done in a frank way because Coleman is transparent about her approach. It’s an achievement, and at that, one that any writer interested in emotional truth should feel liberated by.

This is going to sound ultra corny, but there’s this trailer floating around for a forthcoming Elton John biopic that has this tagline that says something like, “to tell his story, we had to live his fantasy.” It’s not a perfect analogy for what Coleman has done, but it’s far closer than playing off the “truth is stranger than fiction” cliche. I think that’s because Coleman invites us to entertain some dark possibilities that emerge out of just being humans existing in bodies with some basic sense of how we got there. My non-expert opinion is that Coleman’s How to Sit is a game-changer. If not for all writers, at least for me. I feel as convinced as ever that there is an unharnessed, yet unnamed genre that’s the autobiographical equivalent of speculative fiction. I hesitate to call it speculative nonfiction, but can’t really think of a term that better honors the potentialities of the mind. Not to go all linguistic determinism here, but if everything about humans living in society is influenced (if not constructed) by our outlook, then I don’t think it’s that bold to argue that our mind and memory are some of the truest struggles we have to endure. Coleman draws attention to the weight of this phenomenon, and her courage and skill in doing so has been recognized. Earlier this year, How to Sit was named a finalist for the 2019 PEN/Open Book Award.

One-Sentence Journal (Riverfeet Press, 2018) // Chris La Tray

Prior to last week, I could not tell you the last time I experienced pre-cry nose prickles™. I do my fair share of crying, but it’s not usually accompanied by discernible emotions anymore. It’s just like I blow a fuse, and my body activates the cry response in its confused state as a stress release. It’s not very predictable or convenient. And I’ve been wondering for a while if my tear ducts are possessed and will just go off at will now and forevermore. But La Tray’s One Sentence Journal made me second-guess that. Unsurprisingly, dogs were involved in this emotional heat check.

The closing essay of La Tray’s collection, “Notes on the Sacred Art of Dog Walking,” is partly inspired by a poem from Jim Harrison’s final collection called “Notes on the Sacred Art of Log Sitting.” The poem documents a time post-back surgery when Harrison was eager to recover and return to the ordinary pleasure of walking with his yellow lab Zilpha. La Tray traces parallels in his own dog-enabled recovery story. In just a few months near the end of 2014, La Tray lost his father, then his Jack Russell named Velcro, then his German shepherd/golden retriever named Bernard. La Tray found himself grieving along with his surviving Jack Russell named Darla, who was visibly devastated by Bernard’s death. It inspired La Tray to start up a regimen of regular “river saunters” with Darla. Thus began a codependent recovery process that returned dog and handler back to the realm of the living. It continued until Darla passed about two years later. Commence the pre-cry nose prickles™ at the point in the essay where La Tray observes: “Sometimes we don’t know how empty we are until something comes along and fills us.”

I don’t think I’m very good at describing the physiological experience of externalized emotion, but I can say with confidence that pre-cry nose prickles™ never accompany my chronic confused/blown-fuse crying. So I have to believe that bona fide prickles are connected to something primal, and it makes me hopeful that some of my emotional circuitry is still in tact. I have Darla the Adventure Dog, one of the great spirits to whom La Tray’s book is dedicated, to thank for that. To be clear, Darla’s not all that One-Sentence Journal has going for it. There is plenty to laud about La Tray’s style, which I think excels in its range. For every three or four pages, there’s at least one low-key destroyer sentence that made me choke up, and even more sentences that made me laugh out loud to myself (even randomly in public, days after reading). For that and other merits, the collection of essays and poems earned La Tray the 2018 Montana Book Award.

Midnight at the Organporium (Aqueduct Press, 2019) // Tara Campbell

Full-disclosure: I’ve been fortunate to have Campbell as a writing program peer for the past few years. But even though I’m already familiar with (and a fan of) her work, I’m continually amazed by how she leans into her hilarious and weird worlds, and finds a space and audience worthy of both the inventive content and her remarkable craft. Midnight at the Organporium is as weird and beautiful as it is smart and outrageous. And as an experienced oddball, I have to say that it’s not everyday you find people who can take in all those qualities with equal enthusiasm. It’s why I was stunned again and again to find nuggets that made me realize that I’m not the only Tara Campbell reader that picks up on the subtle and brilliant brushstrokes. Some details even feel self-referential within the context of the collection in a way that made me feel in on the joke. And that brought on a really liberating realization: my favorite writers write for readers they can trust. Writing for an audience any larger than that almost invariably leads to overwriting. And while I appreciate the place of stories for the largest possible audience, there’s a pleasure in reading something that an author trusts me to get without the hand-holding.

I won’t spoil the range of ways that Campbell entertains and invites her readers to explore, but to keep it vague: organporium contents may contain traces of necrophilia, unruly house plants, and gentrification as evidence of the Rapture. And I think the may in that statement is of essence because with the longest story in the collection in mind (“Speculum Crede”), I’m not altogether convinced that other readers won’t see witches where I see cats in this collection (and I’m inclined to believe the two are in league with each other in real life). And perhaps that’s all just further evidence of the brilliance of Midnight at the Organporium. Like a tarot reading, maybe it’s different for everyone. In any event, it’s all administered with masterful care and precision. And it earned Campbell a starred review from Publishers Weekly in April.

Beyond the personal factors, I don’t know that I have a solid take on why these books all seem compatible. Sure, they’re all recent and from small presses. And two of the authors are friends with one another (Campbell even gives Coleman a shout-out in her organporium acknowledgments). But the obvious similarities really end there. Still, without thinking too much about it, there are patterns in why I connect with these authors and what I connected to in their work. All three of them are active online. And although I recognize that can be an exhausting beat, I think their work—without necessarily being topical—is strong and self-aware because of it. They all write in a way that’s frank and evocative but never exploitative. Of course, that should be the norm and not the exception. But I think we’ve seen that commerce has a way of changing the standards when it comes to art. There’s a lot of tone deaf stuff out there that gets glorified. And I think it’s all made me realize a big omission in how I’ve been taught writing. That is, we don’t spend that much time talking about authors that are actively doing things on their own terms.

For the most part, with prose in particular, we talk about authors that have already blown up in commercial terms. And if they are doing things on their own terms now, it’s because they already have traction. They’ve already proven to the gatekeepers that they’re sellable. To be fair, I think there’s space for all of this art—commercially viable, avant-garde, or otherwise. But I think what I’m noticing here is that my literary fare doesn’t have to feel so unenriched. Don’t get me wrong, there are some books that I think find their moment in a way that’s unexpected, deserved, and totally on-time (from the 2018 hive, Pachinko and There There immediately come to mind). But I’ll be the first to confess that I haven’t fully appreciated what those small press badasses (vigilantes, even) are quietly doing over on the fringes. As a way of gauging how interesting something or someone is, I ask myself if I’d want to be stuck in detention with it/them in a John Hughes movie. I would be over the moon to be stuck in detention with the three enablers of my small press bender (yep, there’s a Breakfast Club pun in there). I think you’ll feel similarly if you dig into these titles, but in the immediate term, they are all a top-tier hang on ye olde Twitter. Following them will only enhance your digital affect, so here’s where you can find them:

• @tylachelleco (Tyrese Coleman)
• @chrislatray (Chris La Tray)
• @TaraCampbellCom (Tara Campbell)